


misericorde

by thefudge



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, F/M, Love/Hate, Pseudo-Incest, Secret Relationship, Sexual Content, Sibling Bonding, Sibling Incest, Vanya is bi FYI, soundtrack: fourth of july by sufjan stevens and love my way by psychedelic furs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-12-18 13:41:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18250994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefudge/pseuds/thefudge
Summary: "Vanya, tell me a knife fact." Diego and Vanya throughout the years.





	misericorde

**Author's Note:**

> This emotional behemoth is me vomiting all my vanya/diego feelings on the page and getting it out of my system SO THERE (who am i kidding, i'll never actually get it out of my system)  
> I'm only going by the TV series, though I know they happen to be a thing in the comics. Anyway, the timeline here is nonlinear, these are snippets of them growing up and the story does become canon-compliant at one point and then strays very much afield. Oh yeah, this also has spoilers for the whole series, FYI.  
> Anyway, I could probably learn to chill about these ships, but I NEVER DO.

_Did you get enough love, my little dove_  
_Why do you cry?_  
_And I'm sorry I left, but it was for the best_  
_Though it never felt right_  
_My little Versailles_

 

 

 

 

 ***

 

They think they’re real slick, sneaking around after dark.

Diego thumps his pillow. He lies on his back and stares at the ceiling, counting their steps down the hallway. He has a hunch about their secret fort, but he’s never actually followed them there. It would be like admitting he cares.

When they’re gone, he gets up and walks to the door. He turns the knob slowly and parts it half an inch.

Across the hall, he sees he is not the only one who noticed. Little Vanya stares back from a gap in her own doorway.

The whites of her eyes look like satellites orbiting without a planet. He regards her with reluctance. At the moment, she stands there as an ally, someone who shares his concern.

For some months now, they’ve been watching Luther and Allison make off with each other in the night.

It’s been a frustrating experience, more so because the rest of their siblings don’t seem to care. Klaus and Ben always bunk together and Five usually tags along. Diego can often hear them holed up in Klaus’ bedroom, whispering about time travel and eldritch monsters and mascara. Their mother breaks up their little party now and again and marches them off to bed, but she’s never caught Allison and Luther so far.

No. It’s just him and Vanya who are vigilant enough.

Or rather, who are left out.

It stings because it used to be just Vanya sitting on the sidelines. It used to be just her,  waiting her turn, hoping to be let in. And Diego often felt sorry for her, because _all_ of them did, but as their father was fond of saying, pity is nothing more than a backhanded insult. So he just parroted the same empty tune as the rest of his siblings: you can’t join us because you’re too weak and you’d only get in the way and hurt yourself.

Now he feels like he’s in the same boat as her and the currents are rough, and it’s really unfair.

He’s Number _Two_.

That should count for something.

Vanya shuffles her feet in her bunny slippers. She points her thumb down the hallway.

Diego scrunches his eyebrows.

“ _What_?” he stage whispers.

She shrugs and nudges her head sideways as if to say, _wanna go?_

The reasonable response is “go where?”

But this is the fourth night in a row where Luther is off gallivanting with Allison and he’s done waiting around for them. He wants to have his own secret.

He shrugs at her. He’s got nothing better to do. He can’t sleep anyway.

Being twelve sucks.

It sucks less if you get to wander down spooky corridors at night with someone you call sister.

 

 

 

They keep their distance as they walk. They like to feel the empty space around them.

Diego likes the quiet, but his preference is a personal stigma. His speech impediment makes it easier to navigate a silent world. There are other advantages to consider. During the day he’s constantly moving, constantly running to keep up with himself. It’s nice not having to do anything in order to exist. Ambling lazily through this wordless maze. There are no stakes.

He wonders if this is Vanya’s world. Just living without purpose. He doesn’t envy her, but he’d like to tell her she doesn’t have it so bad.

Whenever he looks at her, she’s focused on the walls, tracing her fingertips over the wainscoting as if to confirm they are there. Other times she stares down, measuring her steps, face curtained by her bangs.

He doesn’t try to engage her in conversation. It’s such a weight off his shoulders not having to stutter his way through it. He wouldn’t know what to say anyway, because all he knows about her is that she likes playing the violin and she hates oatmeal. If he were pressed, he might come up with other small, inconsequential details, but they don’t really reveal the girl inside. And if he’s being honest, he doesn’t care about the girl inside. Just like she probably doesn’t care to know him.

They care about each other in that abstract, unfeeling way family does, and it’s enough.

They skirt around old furniture, treading soundlessly on the complicated patterns in the carpet, gazing at nothing in particular. He realizes after a few moments that Vanya does a little movement with her feet after each three steps. She skips.

He watches attentively. It’s got a rhythm to it, three steps, skip, three steps, skip. A simple staccato.

It reminds him of the swish of a knife. Halfway down the corridor, he starts doing it too. It’s unconscious. Every three steps he pulls his ankle back.

 

 

 

In her head, Vanya is riding imaginary horses through the house. Her heart beats fast because Diego has agreed to join her. She wants to tell him something clever, but nothing even remotely interesting comes to mind. She doesn’t know any cool facts about knives. She should read some books about knives.

She doesn’t want to alienate him by acting too clingy.

Instead she acts aloof. It’s always served as a second skin.

It’s difficult to keep it up, however, when she notices Diego’s sudden hitch in movement.

His feet skip on the carpet. He’s found his own horse.

Vanya can’t help it. She breaks out into a small smile.

 

 

Diego has never seen her smile at him directly. He remembers Mother making them watch that old Snow White cartoon when they were little. The evil stepmother cut the apple in half: one part was red and good to eat, one part was white and poisoned. That’s Vanya’s face in this moment. One half if specter white, the other smiles at him and it colors red. Her eyes are dark and glassy. She looks like a nefarious spirit, a goblin of the house.  

 

 

They skip, and skip, and skip. Vanya thinks of music, Diego thinks of words. Skipping serves as both.

 

 

He tapes the book jacket to his punching bag. He plunges his fist into it and strikes young Vanya until the paper starts to crack.

He knows he has to read the book eventually.

He’s a grown-ass man who’s left his past behind and made a name for himself. Yet he’s foolishly afraid of one thing in particular: that Vanya wrote about the times they skipped together at night like two lonely idiots.

When he finds out she did not include this detail, that in fact, she included nothing of their nightly sojourns, that between these pages he’s just Number Two to her, he feels a bitterness that he can’t fully evacuate. He slams his fists into her paper face until the sweat gets into his eyes, makes him tear up.

 

 

 

It becomes routine.

Allison and Luther must be doing far more interesting things than walking and skipping, but it suits Diego and Vanya just fine.

They rarely get bored.

They hold their hands behind their backs and trot slowly through the house, stopping sometimes in front of a mirror or under the stairways to rest. They stand in the dark next to each other and listen to each other breathing.

 

 

 

Sometimes they pretend they’re surveying an alien planet. They pretend their ship has landed in this unlived manor with infinite rooms and infinite secrets. They’re scouts, looking for the buried treasure of an extinct civilization. They don’t take anything that might be missed; they look for scraps under tables and chairs. Vanya comes up with a few beads, Diego finds an old tortoiseshell comb whose teeth are bent inwardly. He runs it down his hand. Tries it on Vanya’s palm too.

“It tickles,” she tells him.

Most of the time, they come up empty-handed.

“Nothing to report,” they say to the mothership and continue their exploration.

 

 

 

Another uneventful game they play is hide and seek. But it isn’t really hide and seek. They just drift in opposite directions, knowing that they’ll run into each other eventually. The person who finds the other one first does not win anything, but Diego admits he likes catching her. He likes the rush of discovery. Vanya is very good at fading in the background, so it can be a challenge. He haunts the hallways, looking for a flitting shadow. He tells himself it’s good practice. Sharpening his senses.

Maybe her special “power” has to do with eluding him and all the others.

 

 

 

“Caught ya,” he whispers, grasping a few strands of brown hair from behind a curtain. It feels like static. Stark electricity runs down his knuckles. For a moment he’s spooked.

Vanya pulls back the curtain in defeat. There’s a smudge of dust on her nose.

No, he chuckles to himself, she’s still ordinary.

 

 

 

Nothing changes during the day. Nothing much.

At breakfast his eyes wander towards her out of habit. She’s the other spare.

Vanya is finding new ways to avoid eating her oatmeal, like taking a bite, chewing it half-heartedly, and then spitting it into her tea cup as she takes a sip. He never noticed it before.

The silence at the table is broken by his short laugh.

“Something in particular amusing you, Number Two?” his father inquires sharply.

Diego looks down at his bowl. His cheeks feel ripe.

“N-no.”

“Yet you laughed.”

“I r-r-remembered a j-joke.”

“Oh. Well, keep it to yourself.”

He does.

To his credit, no one notices anything different about him or her. Not one of his siblings, not even Five, is observant enough to catch the silent understanding.

Hell, not even Diego and Vanya understand their own understanding.

But it’s nice to have a secret.

 

 

She stands in her doorway, watching him paste on his eye-mask for a last-minute mission.

Diego would normally tell her to mind her own business.

But he doesn’t mind that she’s looking.

He sticks out his tongue.

Vanya tucks her mouth behind her door, hiding a smile.

 

 

One night they hear a familiar sound: their father’s cane rattling down the hallway in that sinister _tac-tac-tac_.

Diego quickly grabs her and pushes her against the wall behind a heavy armoire. They wait with bated breaths.

They both think, _we’re finally gonna get caught_ and the prospect thrills them.

After a few anticlimactic minutes they realize he’s not coming for them. They hear commotion from the observatory on the roof.

They know who the culprits are. Allison’s sobs are quite audible as she slams the door to her room.

Diego heaves a sigh and the breath ruffles Vanya’s hair.

She looks up at him.

Her voice comes from somewhere underwater. “Did you know there used to be a special dagger used to finish off wounded soldiers in the past? It was called a “misericorde”. Latin for mercy.”

Diego blinks. “W-What?”

She smiles her goblin smile. “Knife facts.”

 

 

For once, he’ll do anything to reach the top before Luther does.

He clambers the side of the building recklessly, grazing palms and knees until he’s torn them both and bleeding freely.  

He knows Vanya is watching from the opposite roof. If he squints, he can catch the glint of her binoculars.  

His foot slides from its grasp and he falls down a fire escape, breaking both his legs.

Five is the one who gets at the top anyway.

 

 

 

Vanya sits by his bed, hands folded gingerly in her lap.

It’s past midnight.

“I’m sorry.”

“What do _you_ h-have to be sorry f-f-for?” he bites back, straining to move his back against the pillow. It’s a little hard with his legs in the air. “You didn’t p-p-push me, did you?”

Vanya shakes her head. “I guess not.”

“So. Giving y-y-yourself too much c-credit, don’t you think?”

She frowns. “You could’ve died.”

“Nah. Not me.”

“Yes, you.”

“Why d-don’t you t-tell me more knife facts.”

Vanya opens her mouth, closes it, ponders his request.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

He listens to her rattle off the exciting history of cutlasses and their popularity with pirates. He doesn’t realize when he falls asleep to the sound of her quiet, steady voice.

 

 

Grace waits for him to picture the word in his head. He gets there, eventually. He always does.

“You can do it, sweetheart.”

Diego releases a breath. “J-jumping cord.”

“Very good!”

She points to the next card.

Cutlasses.

Diego smiles.

“Vanya.”

_Shit._

Shit. It’s just a slip-up.

All the pain medication he’s been on.

Grace cocks her head to the side. “Yes? Do you want her to come join us?”

“ _No.”_

His mother doesn’t insist because she rarely does anything to upset him. But she is a reliable machine. She stores everything, including this.

 

 

Vanya falls in love with _The Phantom of the Opera_ before she knows its sentimental backstory. She doesn’t know about the masked man and the young ingenue who sings for him. She reads the music sheets and thinks that these are melodies for souls who hunger without ever being fed. She used to scoff at Allison’s mushy paperbacks, but now she has to swallow her pride and admit romance has a certain appeal. This is Broadway music, she’s been informed. Lowbrow, despite its beauty. Yet she practices “Angel of Music” more often than anything else in her repertoire. She stands in front of the mirror and lets the slow progression take her somewhere else. The bow becomes another hand, another voice.

She doesn’t notice Diego leaving his door ajar whenever she plays that one.

 

 

 

He doesn’t like “chamber music” as his father calls it. It puts him to sleep.

Yet he lies on his bed and doesn’t even blink when Vanya is playing across the hall.

She lacks formal skill, is what Reginald keeps saying. She shows no real talent for the violin, though she struggles. She’s painfully ordinary even here.

But there’s something so keen, so weird, so deeply _her_ about her playing that it doesn’t matter. It sounds beautiful because it’s not meant to ever be good or great.  

Years later, Eudora gets tickets for the Broadway show and he finds an excuse to get out of it. He feels awful about it. He can only blame himself for letting the past get to him. And Vanya. He likes to blame her too.

 

 

 

When the chandelier collapses on Luther because of those goons, Diego is terrified for his brother and awed by the half-man, half-primate hiding underneath.

But he also feels a subconscious release. The Phantom’s chandelier has been brought down. It can’t haunt them anymore.

 

 

Vanya lets him touch the violin but only under her watch.

“Father said I could have it. It’s an antique. He wouldn’t tell me who it belonged to.”

Diego shrugs. “He p-probably stole it.”

Vanya’s face darkens. “No. I don’t think so. I hope not.”

“Stole it off a d-dead body.”

She scowls. “Hey, I don’t appreciate that. ”

He smirks and picks up the bow.

“Careful with that,” she says, following  his movements intently.

It cuts sharp, almost sharper than his knives. It could be lethal. He kind of likes that.

He runs two fingers down the gilded blade and it nips the skin so easily. Blood blooms like poppies.

“Oh, no. I _told_ you.”

She takes his fingers quickly and pops them in her mouth. She’s not really thinking about what she’s doing. She just knows she has to stop the bleeding. She doesn’t like to see him hurt, or anyone else for that matter. But he’s a special case because he seems to throw himself at danger.

Diego’s eyes are blown wide as he stares at her mouth around his fingers, lips all the way down to the knuckle. Her tongue is like a Chinese firecracker, the one he wasn't supposed to touch when he was ten and almost got his fingers blown off.

He’s almost fourteen; he can’t be blamed for what happens next. He has to rush out of her room with a crummy excuse about needing the bathroom.

 

 

Their father holds the stopwatch between his fingers while Vanya stands next to him with the whistle. They’re at the top of the stairs, looking down at the rest of the siblings.

At his signal, she blows.

The teenagers rush to climb one over another. Diego’s older now, smarter. He won’t dive in like a fool, he’ll be strategic about it.

He leans against the railing, looks up and sees the column of her legs, the skirt that’s a few inches too short, the blush on her cheeks as she looks down at him.

And it feels like he’s already won. He doesn’t need to reach the top or be Number One. He already is for her.

 

 

But not always. Not forever.

The memory of Five - the first to disappear - follows them everywhere.  

His gilt-framed portrait enshrined above the mantelpiece doesn’t help. Vanya loses herself in contemplation whenever she stares at it. He doesn’t entirely like it, but he knows it’s unreasonable to be jealous. Insane, even. He misses Five too. But there’s a very good likelihood he’s still alive and fucking with them on purpose. It seems like something he would do.

Vanya doesn’t like it when he makes jokes about it.

He asks her, “what would you do if I disappeared?” and he’s proud he doesn’t stutter once.

She leans against the wall. They’re out on a rare night haunt. They don’t skip anymore.

“I’d go insane,” she says in full honesty. “What about you? What would you do?”

He scoffs. “You wouldn’t d-disappear on my watch.”

Almost perfect.

 

 

They sit in the kitchen as she makes the nightly treat for Five.

Diego folds his arms.

“You really think he’s gonna c-come back for your peanut butter and jelly?”

She smiles. “I would.”

Diego rolls his eyes, but a corner of his mouth lifts.

She gives him the knife. “Here.”

He licks it clean.

She leaves one of the lights on for Five.

 

 

Years later, the estranged siblings reunite for Reginald’s funeral and he finds her staring at Five’s portrait with the same faraway look. Diego snaps at her, just for something to do. Just to make her face him.

“Always about Saint Five, huh? Bastard is looking down on us just like Dad.”

Vanya lowers her head.

“He was nothing like Dad.”

Diego is getting fed up with her martyr’s act. “You shouldn't even be here, not after what you did.”

“He was my father too.”

Diego would like to grab her shoulders and shake her, but that would mean touching her and he doesn't know where that will go.

Allison walks in and tells him to stop harassing Vanya.  Like he could stop.

 

 

Ben’s death is not like Five’s disappearance. It’s untouchable, a mistake that accepts no alternatives.  There can be no portraits. Even the statue Reginald erected in his honor feels like a fraud.

Everything falls apart around them, even their understanding. _Especially_ their understanding.

The problem is, Ben died on their watch.

It was the one mission she begged to join because it was taking place in Moscow. She couldn’t convince their father, but she managed to convince Pogo by bringing up her birth mother.  She’d stay out of trouble, she promised. She just wanted to see her. Not to actually _meet_ her, that would be too painful. Just look at her from afar. Take her measure. She had never asked for anything, she’d always complied with her unremarkable place in the Academy. But this was one thing she felt she deserved.

Secretly, she'd always been Pogo’s favorite. He couldn’t deny her, just this once.

Diego nearly had a heart attack when he walked into the hotel room and she was there, sitting by the window, watching the onion domes in the distance.

“Surprise,” she said with an impish smile. The last one.

 

 

Diego kissed her for the first time on the Borodinsky Bridge, near the Roman portico. She was crying the whole time because she found out her mother had died of a postoperative pulmonary complication some years before and Reginald had never bothered to tell her. In fact, it was possible he would not even know. He never bothered much with the fate of the mothers. He had got what he wanted.

Diego held her in his arms for a long time.

“Don’t you ever think about your own mother?” she asked, tilting her head up.

“I already have one,” he said, thinking of Grace. “Don’t need another.”

Their breaths came out in a white plume. It was already winter in October here.

Diego leaned down.

“Aren’t you worried ...someone might see?” she asked, staring at his lips.

“Not here, not now.”

They met halfway. It was a kiss kept under glass, chaste and timid and frightened of itself, unlike the fire brewing underneath. He tasted her tears and her sweet, ordinary mouth.

Vanya kissed back.

“Diego, where the _hell_ are you? _Diego_!”

It was Luther screaming in the two-way radio. He sounded desperate.

Ben died while they were kissing on the bridge.

Vanya threw up afterwards. She couldn’t eat for days. She should have never been there. It was her fault.

Diego didn’t try to talk to her, or make her feel better. They both wanted to suffer.

 

 

 

("You never know when to stop, do you?" she asks, partially concealed by the umbrella, the insignia of their lives.

It feels like she's the one who brought the rain.

Her words beat into his skin like water. _You didn't stop before and look what happened_.) 

 

 

 

The last time they have a heart-to-heart before she leaves the Academy, he’s cutting her hair.

“I just need it to go away,” she says brokenly, holding out her long tresses to him. He has always secretly loved her hair. Everything else about her might be ordinary but these brown locks, their shade like the lacquer on a casket,  slide through his fingers like muddy silk and he doesn't want to see them go.

“Please,” she intones.

Despite her plea, her voice is cold like marble, demanding his unquestioned loyalty. That’s the thing with Vanya, her meekness is the scabbard covering steel. He remembers when she used to play target for him. She would stand against the cork board and tell him to throw the knives without touching her. It was supposed to be a challenge.

"Come on, you can do it."

“N-no way.”

Vanya narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you afraid?”

“No, but -”

“Your aim is perfect, unless you _want_ to hit me. Do you?”

“Of c-course not.”

“Then I don't see the problem.”

“What about you?” he asked.

She wanted to feel something. She wanted adventure. 

“I'm not scared. I trust you.”

Diego had felt like Number One. Powerful with her life in his hands.

He’d hurled the knives at her thirteen year-old body, making a crown around her head.

Now he holds his hand on that head, feels the warmth of her scalp.

And runs his knife through her hair.

 

 

It unnerves him that over a decade later she still wears it that exact same length.

 

 

She leaves him a note on his bed.

_Knife fact: The Sudanese kujang is a sickle-shaped dagger believed to maintain balance in the world._

_Make sure you keep the balance, D._

_Love,  V._

It’s a crummy way to say goodbye.

 

 

 

It’s not difficult to track down a runaway seventeen year-old. In fact, she doesn’t make it a secret. She doesn’t need to. She’s applied to a conservatory in London and got in.

Diego finds the pamphlet under her bed. He tells his father who, in his peculiar fashion, almost admires Vanya’s strike at independence. “She’s only doing what she’s supposed to. Regular children grow up and go to university.”

Diego feels betrayed in a new way by this family. Vanya is going to join society and be normal. She’s going to fit in. But they’re just going to stay freaks. They’ll be the ones waiting on the sidelines.

He leaves the nest a month later to join the police academy.

 

 

 

It’s not that she wanted to go to college that upset him. It’s the note. Why say goodbye? Couldn’t they keep seeing each other? Christmas and spring break, at least? Why did she make it sound like this is the end?

Is it Ben? Is it everything that happened afterwards? Or before?

Is it him? Did she just want to get away from him?

That’s when the spiral starts. Self-hatred and self-doubt.

 

 

At twenty-one he’s convinced himself that a) his childhood never really happened, not to him, b) his bond with Vanya was a desperate attempt to keep the loneliness at bay, and c) he doesn’t need her anymore.

In fact, he laughs at himself looking back, wondering why he even liked her.

He sees a photo of her online from a concert given by her school. She’s sitting in the back, dressed in a stiff black dress with prim long sleeves. Her hair is pulled tight, her forehead is too wide. She’s skinny and diminished, eyes lacking lustre. There’s something ethereal about her ugliness that gets under his skin, but he laughs it off and thinks that he would never have chosen her as friend or anything else had they not been stuck together.

 

 

 

Allison’s wedding is a surprisingly small affair, given her level of stardom. She has managed to rumor the paparazzi away for one night. She did too good a job. The wedding tent feels almost empty, especially on her side of the family. Her father hasn’t shown up, but he’s sent Pogo and Grace. Luther is remarkable absent too.

Allison smiles and tries to forget about the empty seats. She dances with Patrick to Leonard Cohen and the dim fairy lights shine in their eyes.

Eudora leans over and whispers in Diego’s ear, “Okay, no offense, this wedding is kind of sad.”

Diego rubs the back of her arm. “Regret being my date?”

“No, but I’ve been to funerals that were more upbeat.”

“Welcome to the family.”

“Oh hey, is that your other sister?”

The small figure walking down the lawn towards the tent is dressed in a black suit and tie. Her hair is loose, her eyes are shaded. The last faint glimmers of sunset pool at her feet like blood. She looks like some kind of grim reaper.

He chokes, dread gripping his throat. “What is _she_ doing here?”

Allison breaks away from Patrick with a happy gasp. She rushes towards Vanya. The sisters hug for a long moment.

Eudora nudges him.

“Aren’t you gonna join the family reunion?”

He rubs his throat, tries to get some air. He swigs more wine, but it doesn't help.

“Vanya and I aren’t that close.”

His sister stares at him over Allison’s shoulder.

She mouths a small, apologetic “hey”.

Diego shakes his head imperceptibly and looks away.

 

 

 

Eudora is the one who makes it her business to talk to Vanya, because unlike him, “she wasn’t raised rude”.

Diego can’t stop her.

“I _love_ your suit,” Eudora says, shaking her hand. “It’s so cool and classy.”

Vanya beams. “Thank you. I love your...everything. You’re gorgeous. She looks down bashfully. “Sorry, I tend to blurt things out.”

Eudora blushes. “Wow, are you sure you’re related to Diego? I can’t get him to say one nice thing.”

Diego’s smile is forced. He still hasn’t recovered from the shock of seeing her here for the first time in six years. She’s wearing a tie clip, and for some reason his eyes keep straying to its glint. A small knife pinned to her chest.

Eudora’s right. She looks good in that suit.

He hates her for showing up out of the blue, for thinking that she could, for complimenting his girlfriend.

He wants to ask her what the hell she’s doing, but she doesn’t give him the chance.

“This might sound out of the blue, but do you wanna dance?” she asks his girlfriend.

“Oh, yes, please. Anything to get this party going.”

 

 

Klaus stops by his table as he refills his glass. “Yiiikes. Looks like Sis is out there making moves on your girl. I should take notes.”

Diego’s jaw has been clenched for so long he can barely open it to tell him off.

Vanya and Eudora are slow-dancing rather clumsily to ABBA and his girlfriend looks like she’s having the time of her life.

Vanya smiles a melancholy smile, signalling she’s here but somewhere else too. She turns Eudora around slowly until the woman’s back is against her chest. She clasps their hands together and leans her chin in the crook of her shoulder as they sway to the music.

Diego swallows. He can see Eudora do the same.

No one’s really ready for Vanya when she strikes. She has this unobservable, self-effacing way of making you lose your head. A fox turning the wolf dizzy.

 

 

Vanya walks by the lake with her hands fisted in her pockets. The wedding party is slowly coming to an end before it properly began.

Diego throws his cigarette in the water.

“Hey…” she begins, “I was looking for -”

“Why are you really here?” he cuts her off.

“I missed you guys,” she says shyly.

“Couldn’t have picked up the phone or write?”

“I did try to write, but nothing sounded good.”

He nods and smiles sardonically. “You can save it. I don’t really c-care.”

He hates that he misses the mark on the last word. He was doing so well.

“What about you? Why didn’t you contact me?”

He can’t believe her. “I’m not the one who _left_.”

“But you did leave, eventually,” she argues.

Diego exhales angrily. “I’m not t-talking about this with you.”

Her face crumples. She raises a hand to her jaw as if something hurts inside.

“Do you wanna hear a knife fact?”

Diego shakes his head.

“You’re n-nuts. Stay away from me and my girlfriend.”

And he leaves her standing there by the lake.

 

 

A year later she publishes the book.

 

 

The betrayal he felt when he saw the book in print is mirrored in her eyes when he stands by the sealed door and watches her scream and cry without doing anything. He feels paralyzed. He’s already fought with Luther, already tried to open the door himself, but his brother has the access code.

He places his palm on the foggy glass. He’s not afraid of her, but he’s afraid for her.

Vanya wipes a tear and walks away into the darkness of her cell.

 

 

The rest of his siblings are stunned about her dormant powers, but it hardly fazes him. He doesn’t know why. He keeps waiting for the shock to hit him. If he’s honest he doesn’t really register the powers as they are; he only thinks about the danger, and the fact that she might get hurt. He remembers screaming at her when he found out she was in the house while Cha Cha and Hazel went gun-happy on everyone.

 _A liability_ , he’d called her as he saw a trickle of blood glide down her cheek. He'd been scared shitless. 

And now what? How will he keep her out of danger if the danger is herself?

He revisits the past in his mind and thinks about all the times he forgot that Vanya wasn’t special. It never occurred to him to question that forgetfulness.

 

 

The apocalypse is happening tomorrow and they’re running out of options.

Allison draws spirals in her notebook, throat taped shut.

She’s cried all the tears she had to cry, soundlessly.

Vanya’s escaped her cell - torn it down, to be accurate - and no one can reach her, inside and out.

Five sits on the kitchen table and taps his fingers against his knobby knees.

“If anyone has any bright ideas, now’s the time to speak up.”

Diego is numb, can’t even feel his own face as he runs his hand over it.

It’s Grace who finally clears her throat, placing a new batch of pancakes in front of them.

“Cutlasses,” she says. “Vanya. Cutlasses. Cutlasses. Vanya. Easy.”

“What? Is she having a malfunction?” Five demands. “What’s happening to her?”

Luther frowns. “What are you trying to say, Mom?”

Grace turns to Diego with a patient smile.

He remembers. Moms always know just what to say, don’t they?

Diego clears his throat.

“What she’s trying to say is that I...could possibly get through to Vanya.”

Five raises a critical eyebrow. “Why you specifically? It's not like you were close.”

“Uh, it’s...complicated.”

"How?"

"I can't explain."

Allison scribbles in her notepad furiously. _JUST TELL US._

Diego doesn’t know where to begin. So he doesn’t. He starts in the middle.

“The day Ben died, I was with Vanya.”

He tells them what he was doing with her on the bridge. No one has anything to say to that.

The kitchen is as silent as a churchyard.

Luther and Allison share a startled, guilty look. They’d thought they were the only ones.

It’s Klaus who breaks the moment with a chuckle. “Pent-up Knife Boy and Mousy Violin Girl? Guess it makes a weird kind of sense.”

Diego glares. “You want me to pull out your tongue? Cuz it can be arranged.”

Klaus ignores him. “So that’s why Ben told me he saw you walk out of Vanya’s bedroom once. Now I wonder what you two were doing in there.”

“What the hell are you implying?”

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist, sweetheart. It’s a pretty normal assumption to make in this fucked up family,” Klaus argues, looking at his siblings for confirmation.

“Sooo, did you?” his brother prods mercilessly. “It would explain a lot about you. And her.”

Even Five leans forward and looks like he wants to know.

Diego makes a face. “Jesus, _no_. Fuck you guys for even thinking it.”

Klaus raises his hands placatingly. “All right, all right, it’s not like you’re _actually_ related. But okay, you didn’t fuck your sister, we take your word for it.”

Diego throws the butter knife so close to Klaus’ ear that his brother feels the sting. He presses his hand to the shell to quell the bleeding.

"Yeah, don't let this psycho talk to Vanya," he croaks. "He'll just throw a knife at her." 

Diego can’t quite meet Luther’s eyes. Because he knows his brother could tell he’s been lying through his teeth.

 

 

It happens after she publishes the book.

He comes straight down to her apartment when he’s fed up with using the punching bag.  

“You’re a cold fucking bitch. _We were never a real family_?” he quotes from her book.

Vanya doesn’t have the decency to look ashamed, but it’s hard to tell with her.

“I wrote what I experienced. My version of it, at least.”

“That’s a bag of horseshit and you know it.”

She clenches her jaw.  “Why do you get to have a say in my narrative?”

“Because I was there!” he screams in her face. “And we - we lived through that s-shit together, didn’t we?”

“It's not about you, Diego. It’s about what our father did to me, to all of us. Because of him you barely acknowledged my existence in public -”

“Oh, cut the crap. You only c-called me Diego in private.”

The memories start pouring down like rainwater between them.

She folds her arms defensively.

“Even if you think we were the same, you still got to be in the big picture.”

He knows she’s speaking metaphorically but he also remembers that self-important group photo and he winces.

“You know I hated that. I told you afterwards I was gonna b-b-burn every copy -”

“That’s really not the point.”

“What the hell is the point, Vanya? What is the point of r-resurrecting this s-stupid t-teenage angst?”

He can’t stop stuttering now.

And even though she’s mad at him, a part of her reaches out to him, a flitting shadow, touching his side.

“Someone had to expose that family,” she says quietly. “Someone had to expose the eccentric billionaire who played with children’s lives.”

“And it h-had to be you?”

She doesn’t meet his eye. “Who else?”

“You d-didn’t expose us,” he says, apropos of nothing.

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

Vanya looks at him like he’s slow on the uptake.

“You know why. Those were happy moments. The happiest. I wouldn't let the world have them. But I hate that they happened because of him. Because he brought us together.”

Diego swallows thickly. He turns away, anger still simmering but now fighting an overwhelming need to wrap his arms around her. He wants to tell her not everything happened because of the old man. He takes in her rundown apartment, the peeling wallpaper, the threadbare rug on the floor. There’s a coldness here, a lack of feeling.

“This place is a dump.”

“I like it that way.”

He leans forward.

“Why did you -”

Vanya grabs his arm. “Let’s not talk about it.”

And Diego obliges.

 

 

He’s clumsy and bearish. Can’t really undress because he’s forgotten the steps. He falls on the bed and drags her with him but she slips through his fingers and he doesn’t know exactly where she’s gone. One minute she’s here, then she disappears, then she is right against him, a game of hide and seek in the dark. Her hair is loose and her lips brush against his and he can finally thread his fingers through muddy silk. She’s a skinny, unlikable thing, a sea creature that people prod with a stick. He likes the coldness of her skin, likes the bitter taste of her lips, lips that don’t enjoy things, lips that rarely smile anymore. She is the opposite of a spark, she mutes desire. If someone were to take a picture it would look like a man loving a statue. He doesn’t really want her as he kisses the side of her neck and there’s something maddening about it, how he’s tethered but untethered, how she gives him the illusion of independence, even as every nerve in his body is attuned to her movements.

He doesn’t really see their bodies anymore, he sees pieces, fragments cut from some larger picture. The fever takes him forward, pitches him like a knife.

He’s weak in her hands, moans in broken syllables, blade cutting too deep, and Vanya says “ _shhhh_ ” as she kisses a trail down his abdomen and takes him in her mouth.  

 

 

 

(when Allison asks her in anger if she's ever been in a relationship, if she's ever felt love like _that_ , love that makes you ready to die for someone, Vanya says nothing. no, she can't say there's been anyone special. she hasn't had room for anyone else.)

 

 

 

He swears - although he can’t be trusted - there’s a moment when he’s inside her and she’s pinned under him and they’re both close, that her eyes flicker _blue_ , the pupils glowing unearthly.

He remembers the mothership, landing in an unlived manor.

 

 

“That was…” he trails off.

Vanya nods.

“How the hell does that skinny body have so much stamina?”

She seems to give the question real thought.

“I have no idea.”

Diego smirks. “Could be the miracle of my -”

She groans. “ _Don’t_.”

Some moments of silence pass while she shrugs on a T-shirt.

“We should feel weirder about this,” he remarks, studying her profile. “But it doesn’t feel weird.”

“I guess we’re freaks.”

“Or,” and he parrots from her book, “we were never a real family.”

Vanya heaves a sigh. “You’re not gonna let me forget that one, huh?”

“Never.”

She laughs a short, brittle laugh. “Maybe we’re still competing with Luther and Allison.”

He smiles wearily. “Yeah, pretty sure those two are still dancing around each other.”

She lies down next to him. “Imagine how disappointed Dad would be. All his kids turned out to be perverts.”

“Eh. He’s pervert number one.”

Vanya traces the scar from his ear to his cheek. The patch of skin is so soft it scares her.

She turns away.

They sleep for a while, his hand wrapped around her waist, nose buried in her back.

When he opens his eyes, he feels bereft.  

She’s sitting away from him, legs drawn to her chest, face shuttered.

“This was a mistake,” she says quietly.

Diego raises himself on his elbows. “That how you really feel?”

Vanya shrugs. “No...but I wish I did. This isn’t a healthy coping mechanism.”

“Which is?”

“Avoiding our problems by having sex.”

Diego shrugs. “Works for me.”

“Does Eudora know you’re here?”

He runs a hand down his face. “We’re on a break. Actually, we broke up, but maybe not for good.”

Vanya nods. “I hope not. She’s wonderful. You can’t lose her.”

Diego exhales. “Why is it so important to you?”

“I want you to be happy.”

He shakes his head. “Why the fuck do you always have to do t-that?”

“What?”

“Undermine every single g-goddamn moment we have together.”

Vanya opens her mouth. She knows it’s true, that she’s always sabotaging them, one way or another. But she’s doing it for _him_. Allison’s rumor worked a little too well. Vanya knows a girl like her will only stand in the way of someone like him.  

She gets up and shuffles towards the kitchen.

“Do you want coffee?”

He gets dressed with ashes in his mouth.

He doesn’t want coffee.

 

 

A criminal has his sister. He's wormed his way into her life, under her skin. 

Allison said they were together, that she trusted him, that she wanted to feel special.

Diego doesn't understand. Only _family_ can make you feel special. 

No one else can make you feel whole. 

He breaks his knuckles when he punches into wood instead of a punching bag. 

 

 

When he finds Leonard’s body maimed and crucified in his own living room his lips twitch. Beyond the horror of the moment he feels deep-rooted satisfaction. He almost wishes he’d helped. He takes out a small blade and sinks it into the dead flesh for good measure.  

 

 

It doesn’t matter who they are and what they’ve done. He would do this for her even if she weren’t his sister.

The world spins madly in a flash of white. His siblings are retching and heaving on the floor.

He enters the blaze and feels the destructive vacuum sucking him dry.

He forces his feet to walk, his lips to speak.

“Hey! Hey, look at me! Vanya! _Vanya_!”

The girl with the blue eyes and white violin turns her glacial head towards him.

“Vanya! Tell -tell me a knife fact!”

Her bow skips on the strings.

His teeth rattle in his mouth. His skin is burning from within. Yet he doesn’t stutter.

“Tell me like you used to! Tell me a knife fact!”

Vanya’s face reminds of the evil stepmother’s apple, half-poison, half-life.

She pauses in her playing. Parts her ghostly lips. 

Diego waits for her, nods his head encouragingly. 

Allison appears backstage behind them. Diego can see her from the corner of his eye. She has the gun trained on Vanya's head.

He gestures desperately to his sister.

“Vanya, tell me a knife fact!”

She’s about to run the bow against the strings again when he shouts, “The knife! The knife used on a soldier when he has no chance of survival, the knife for mercy - for mercy -!”

Vanya drops the bow.

“ _Misericorde_ ,” she says softly, voice eerie and deafening, a wave shaking the walls of concert hall.

She lowers the violin.

Diego rushes towards her to catch her as she falls, and Allison shoots blindly at the white light.

 

 

She’s lying in his arms, head cradled in his chest as the moon breaks into chunks which hurdle into space towards their defenseless planet.

Diego smiles down at his sister. The little freak. The special one.

His family is all around him, joining hands.

As apocalypses go, this isn’t too bad.

 

 

 

They’re fifteen and Reginald Hargreeves is away for a few days. Matters of urgent business in India. Possibly another special child.

The kids have the house to themselves for the first time since they can remember.

Even Grace and Pogo can’t stop them.  They let them run around the house, listen to music, dance.

It’s a little reprieve, a small oasis in the drudgery of the Umbrella Academy.

“I Think We’re Alone Now” plays from the speakers loudly.

Luther is dancing on the parlor table. Klaus is shaking his butt while Allison spanks him playfully with one of her pink scarves.

In the foyer, Vanya skips and slides down the parquet in her knee socks.

Diego tries to catch her, but he ends up dragging her down to the floor.

_And then you put your arms around me_

_and we tumble to the ground..._

They both groan as they roll on their backs.

They stare at the dangling chandelier above them.

They're both thinking the same thing.

If the giant candelabrum fell down on them right now, it would not be a bad way to go. 

They smile in the dark.

Not bad at all. 

 


End file.
